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Dream Tropes Wiki/Hidden Track
It's been a good five minutes since the last song on the CD ended. By now, you've kind of relaxed yourself (and by relaxing, we most likely mean planning on spending the next 3 hours looking for examples for all those YKTTWs), when, suddenly... is that... music? Congratulations, you've just discovered a Hidden Track, the trope where the Easter Egg and the Bonus Material make love inside an album. At its most basic, the Hidden Track is just a song on the album that isn't on the playlist. However, musicians have sometimes played further tricks in order to play into the fact that they are rewards for faithful listeners who listen all the way through the album. Some have hidden it several minutes after the last listed song after some dead time. With Compact Discs and digital technology, people have been able to play further tricks by hiding them in a Track 0 spot, or making them only accessible by computer or only when playing all the way through continuously. The name harks back to when each song was a track running along the vinyl disc. The Beatles are the Trope Namer, having done it first on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It's still a very widely used term for individual music pieces. If you knew this already, you should just roll your eyes at the lame squares who needed a widely used word explained to them; if you didn't, then don't worry, those other people are jerks. In video games, this trope covers music tracks that aren't used in the game but aren't so Dummied Out that they're inaccessible without outright hacking the game. The hidden music might be accessible through the Sound Test, or by inserting the game's CD-ROM into any ordinary CD player (taking care not to play the game data on Track 1). This practice is dying out with the rise of iTunes and Digital Distribution, partially because these services have led to trends shunning albums, with material on the albums being more likely to be shuffled and thus not worth considering as much as a single continuous work, leading to more artists releasing more and more singles. Many songs that were previously hidden tracks are now being listed in album tracklists with many digital providers (even those listed under "Hidden in the Middle of the Album" below). It's also very easy to spot a hidden song when the last track is 20 minutes long. The music provider service Bandcamp allows artists to add hidden tracks to their digital releases, keeping the format alive in some respects. Some artists have also opted to keep bonus tracks available only on physical editions of the album. Unlisted independent track * Whodunnit? A Share A Story Musical Mystery has it's soundtrack end with "Hooray (The Day Is Great!)", then 15 seconds later "East Bound and Down" by Jerry Reed, the song heard in the trailers, starts up. On CD player displays, it's listed as "HIDDEN - EAST BOUND AND DOWN". Category:Tropes